"He asked for the heart carved from your breast": some secrets & some Snow White
On her wedding night, the banquet roared on below. Prince Felipe swept Blanca Nieve to his bedchamber; there, with a gasp, she beheld a mirror balanced against the wall. It was neither ornate nor gold-framed, but a slab of dark, metallic glass. Obsidian-smooth in the candlelight, its surface shifting like mercury, like memory.
My dearest paid subscribers,
It's time for an exclusive short story. But first: a quick bit of housekeeping.
I’m popping into your inbox a few weeks later later than I planned for two reasons.
One: over the course of the last month and change, at least one person in my household has been sick, including my daughter, who had a nasty fever that she’s only just kicked (but the hideously runny nose and cranky spells remain, oh joy). There’s been lots of crying, lots of food refusal, dehydration, and exhausted contact naps. We are wiped.
Second: my grandmother passed away about two weeks ago.
I haven’t told many people, because I find the resulting condolences exhausting and, frankly, upsetting. (So please don’t email me about this. Really, don’t. I appreciate the sentiment but I don’t have the energy to process right now.) But I wanted to let you know that it was not for nothing that I fell behind on putting this newsletter out at the beginning of the month.
I also hesitated to write to you because I had to change plans: I am offering a different story than the one I promised in my last newsletter. Alas, the above circumstances messed with my workflow significantly, and I have some serious catching up to do on the novel that I have due to my publisher on Monday (!! how is the tail end of March already upon us!?). That deadline takes precedence over this wee newsletter, unfortunately. I want this book to stick to schedule and get into your hands as soon as possible!
I have a lot of drafting to do between now and Monday. Not to mention (and this is info exclusive to this newsletter!!) research on mercury poisoning, silver amalgamation in 18th-century Zacatecas, the Inquisition in Nueva España, and the old Catholic exorcism rite.
*Waggles eyebrows suggestively. Gee, I wonder if this book has anything to do with possession, or if it could possibly be pitched as The Exorcist in colonial Mexico? I dunno, guys. It's a mystery. Guess I'll just have to get back to listening to the project playlist and daydream about it.
*slow wink
...I know that has whet your appetite, so, without further ado: let me tell you a story.
“Blanca Nieve Remembers the Mirror” is a retelling of Snow White that I wrote for a flash fiction class, the same flash fiction class in which I wrote “There Are No Monsters on Rancho Buenavista,” which was included in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2023 ed. by R.F. Kuang and has been taught in creative writing classrooms (!!) in both the U.S. and Latin America. Flash fiction is defined as a short story under 1000 words. "Blanca Nieve" sneaks in at a tidy 999; any more detail, any more plot, and I could not have submitted it for the class. And at a pace of a story a day for a full week, I really, really wanted to submit the work that I had done.
I love flash fiction. She's sparse and mean and leaves before you've even realized that you've been stabbed and are bleeding. “Blanca Nieve Remembers the Mirror” takes that stabbing to heart. It's a dark fairy tale remix that has never been seen on the internet. Never been published.
Until now.
Enjoy.
I’ll be back soon with more secrets and more stories.
xxxx
BLANCA NIEVE REMEMBERS THE MIRROR
On her wedding night, the banquet roared on below. Prince Felipe swept Blanca Nieve to his bedchamber; there, with a gasp, she beheld a mirror balanced against the wall. It was neither ornate nor gold-framed, but a slab of dark, metallic glass. Obsidian-smooth in the candlelight, its surface shifting like mercury, like memory.
Felipe brought Blanca forward, beginning an incantation she could not understand. A spell directed at the mirror, punctuated with the lift of a question.
The mirror replied with a low, reverberating hum. Its surface swirled; shifted.
Blanca’s reflection came into focus. Only her reflection, though Felipe stood at her side, his grip on her newly-ringed hand tightening. Only her face, fabled by whispers. Beauty that caught the eye of the fairest prince of them all. Hair like ebony. Lips red as blood. Skin white as snow.
She should have remembered the metallic reflection of her own sudden alertness as Felipe yanked her back with a knife-sharp look. She had seen echoes of this look when he courted her: when she laughed too loudly, when she teased him before courtiers.
She could not afford to fear him then. Abandoned by a family who preferred sons, Blanca scrubbed sheets until her hands were chapped to earn a hard place to sleep on an innkeeper’s floor. Felipe’s attention shattered her world and remade it. It was a salve on her sores; rain cracking a drought. So she suffocated her fears with down pillows and fine fabrics. Long had she yearned for a companion to soften fate’s jagged edges; now that she had one, she swore she would not lose him to something as silly as fear.
#
She should have remembered the mirror.
Perhaps then she would have been warier. She might have spied a cloaked form approach with a sack as she strolled in a palace garden. Dark surprise and fumes filled her lungs as she screamed.
Her consciousness sharpened when the sack was ripped off and she was flung to the earth. The sun set behind dark pines. A bearlike man with a gray-streaked beard stood over her, a long hunting knife in his hand. He raised it over his head, blade catching the red edge of twilight.
Blanca scrambled backward over tangled roots; struck a trunk. She flung her arms over her face and braced for pain.
None came.
“I can’t.” Two words, splintered and hoarse.
Blanca lowered her arms.
Her kidnapper—a huntsman, by his dress—knelt before her, face in his hands, knife abandoned on pine needles.
“He asked for the heart carved from your breast. I have no stomach for this butchery.” He unbuckled a dagger from his broad waist and thrust it at her. She took it warily. “Take this to defend yourself. Run!”
Run. Its echo drove her into the forest.
#
She found refuge in an abandoned temple. Her days: foraging with the huntsman’s dagger, leaving the temple’s seven mossy idols offerings in return for protection. Evenings: trailed by soft surprise, even satisfaction, at her own self-reliance as she warmed herself by the fire.
But her nights: cold, long. No company but her thoughts.
He asked for the heart carved from your breast.
Weeks passed. Solitude eroded memories of sharp looks like water on stone. That couldn’t have been Felipe. The huntsman was wrong.
Her breath caught when she saw Felipe cantering through the woods on his white horse. He fell to his knees, golden hair awry, face streaked with tears.
He begged her to return.
She should have remembered the mirror. But loneliness opened her arms to him.
“How did you find me?” she asked, smothering her hesitation in his embrace.
“The mirror,” he murmured. “It showed me how to find my one true love.”
She should have remembered the mirror’s glint, how it reflected in his hard eyes.
She didn’t. And when he offered her an apple before riding back to the palace, she took it.
#
Now, Blanca lays in heavy oblivion. The darkness cracks—something around her shakes; laughter lilts drunken overhead.
Something catches near the back of her throat. She gags; spits, sharp bite of apple leaving a painful tingling on her lips.
She opens her eyes.
She stares through thick glass but a hand’s breadth from her nose. Felipe’s banners hang on stone walls; she is in the throne room.
She is in a coffin.
Her heart sticks against her throat in panic.
Voices echo dully through the glass. Some banquet guest leans against it, rattling the coffin again, their weight imbalanced and wine-heavy. Presently, conversation leads them away.
Blanca is alone. Trapped.
Because Felipe offered her the apple.
Felipe never wanted a wife of flesh and blood. Felipe wanted this: a silent, stiff idol, encased in glass.
All Blanca wanted was companionship. Now, Blanca wants to live.
She lifts a stiff hand to her waist, praying for the huntsman’s dagger. It’s there. She grips its sheath, holds its pommel out. She squeezes her eyes and lips shut.
With all the rage in her ribs, she strikes the side of the coffin. Over and over. A blow for every sharp look. A blow for the huntsman. A blow for the apple.
Glass shatters.
Blanca Nieve rises from the coffin, forearms shredded and slick, clutching the dagger in a red-soaked fist.
She retraces the path of her wedding night, silent steps accented with dripping blood. The prince’s chamber is empty. Ambergris and holiness curl around the mirror.
Later, she’ll steal boots and a horse and run farther than she did before. Maybe her sliced arms will sicken and poison her; maybe she’ll die of blood loss. Maybe she’ll be recaptured all the same.
Maybe.
She faces the reflection that reveals herself across smoky, mercurial waters. Tangled hair, bitten lips. Cheeks wan and bloodless from untold weeks in a coffin.
But her eyes crackle with fey energy.
Blanca shifts the dagger in her hand, lifting it high.
This time, she remembers the mirror.
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